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Dementia Facts Infographic

This infographic is about dementia, a terrible and destructive illness that no only obliterates the mind of the person who has it, but devastates the family as well. The infographic is geared toward the UK, and only shows information about dementia in the UK, but it’s really bad here, too. I won’t go into stories, but I know we all have some. Let’s look at the facts.

The Numbers

In the UK, over 750,000 people have dementia, and 16,000 of them are younger people. I don’t know right off how they classify “younger people” but I’m assuming it’s explained further down in the infographic. They extrapolate on that 750,000 number, stating that 1 in 82 of the UK population has dementia. They say that there will be 1 million people with dementia by the year 2025.

The Demographics

We’re told that 2/3 of people with dementia in the UK are women, and 2/3 of the population of total people with dementia live out in the community, rather than in care homes like the other 1/3. Additionally, 1/3 of all people in the UK over the age of 95 have dementia. I suppose that number above that states that by 2025 cases of dementia will increase to 1 million probably accounts for the amount of people who will be 95 or older by then, among other things.

The Money

Dementia costs the UK 20 billion pounds each year, while the presence of family care workers saves the UK about 6 billion pounds per year. That shows that the cost of dementia is devastating to the UK.

Mortality

60,000 deaths per year in the UK are because of dementia. If there were some way to delay the onset of dementia by 5 years, the annual death rate would drop to 30,000. I don’t really know how they came up with that number – and it seems to me that either way you look at it, delayed 5 years or not, the amount of deaths caused by dementia would be the same, they’d just be spaced out a bit.

Design: C-

The sketches are meant to humanize the disease, I suppose, and I guess it would be hard to put actual sketches of people with dementia on this, but the sketches don’t work for me. Nor does the big scale graphic in the middle. I do like the blue color, and I like the background that looks like wallpaper in my granny’s house.

Information: C

While there is some useful and informative information in this infographic, I feel that the numbers could have been quantified more, and that more information could have been provided. For instance, how would they go about preventing the onset of dementia? And what about the “younger people” who suffer from the disease? That’s never addressed. The pie chart shows the lowest age range of 70-74, so I guess that’s the younger group, but I wish it had been more explicitly explained.

This is, however, the designer’s second attempt at an infographic, so I’m giving him average scores because he’s just starting out.